How can we make sure this doesn’t happen again?

Influencer Manon Lanza has been the victim of cyberbullying since the GP Explorer 2. This is not the first time that women exposed on social networks have denounced the sexist harassment they suffer. What can be done to avoid this type of situation as much as possible?

Women at the wheel, harassment at the turn? The second edition of the GP Explorer, a Formula 4 race mainly bringing together influencers, has brought back to light the issue of cyberbullying targeting women exposed on social networks.

During this race on Saturday, videographer Manon Lanza hit the car of another YouTuber, Maxime Biaggi. Both had to withdraw and the driver, injured, was taken to hospital. Verdict: chest shock and a cervical hernia. Meanwhile, on social networks, a mountain of messages, many of them sexist (“woman at the wheel…”, “go back to doing the dishes”) and insulting, quote her.

This is not the first time that a major event on the French Internet has led to the cyberbullying of a woman. Streamer Ultia had a bitter experience of this during the ZEvent (a charity marathon on Twitch) in 2021. Denouncing the sexist behavior of the influencer Inoxtag, she received a wave of insults and rape threats on social networks. Even today, she tells BFMTV.com that she receives insulting messages on an almost daily basis.

Content creators are also targeted outside of these major events. Female streamers have been denouncing the sexism they face every day on Twitch for years, and highly viewed videos can also serve as a pretext for waves of cyberbullying. This is what happened in April to Audrey, a participant in a video by Squeezie, the most followed YouTuber in France (18 million subscribers). But There are solutions to prevent such outbreaks of violence.

Prevention before events

Once harassment has started, it is almost “too late” to do anything about it, streamer Nat’ali laments to BFMTV.com. “To prevent harassment, it is a deep, continuous work, which requires questioning, investment,” she believes.

Laure Salmona, co-founder of the collective Feminists Against Cyberbullying, also suggests measures to put in place before large-scale events such as the GP Explorer or the ZEvent. “In many physical events today, there are posters, or a speech at the beginning of the event saying that there will be zero tolerance for sexist and sexual assaults, racist, etc.”, underlines the co-author of the book Politicizing cyberviolence.

“I don’t see what prevents us from doing the same thing by talking specifically about online violence and cyberbullying,” she continues.

Awareness through content

Nat’ali would also like content creators to “learn about cyberbullying, about sexism, about how to better manage it” and to talk about it “as and when” they publish, “well before an event.”

“People who have a huge community, who know that their audience can participate in cyberbullying raids in one way or another, should use this large audience to do prevention on the subject”, by inviting specialists for example, approves Laure Salmona.

Appropriate crisis management

This does not mean that we should sit back and watch the first messages of sexist cyberbullying arrive. Nat’ali would have liked the GP Explorer to have a “crisis management communications team specializing in cyberbullying.” When contacted, Bump, the agency that organized the event, did not tell us whether this had been done.

Manon Lanza herself felt that the reaction of the participants in the race had not been up to par. Speaking to AFP, she said that “things did not go as they should have” to protect her.

“The commentators only showed Maxime’s vision, so it’s hard to see what’s happening on the track. (…) It would have been good to have other angles, or an image of the ambulance so that people could see that I was injured,” she emphasizes.

Indeed, at the time of the accident, on the live race, the commentators largely underlined Maxime Biaggi’s disappointment at the sudden end of his experience in the second lap. Even if they affirm that they “absolutely do not blame Manon”, that “it’s the game” and that such moments are “part of the race”.

“He was so exemplary, he was so studious on this GP Explorer that it really, really hurts, especially so early in the race”, we hear people say, just like “that’s not done” and “they (Editor’s note: Maxime and a member of his team) bring tears to my eyes”.

Immediate and unequivocal reactions

Manon Lanza also told AFP that she would have liked “the reaction to be more immediate from YouTubers and for them to feel as concerned as a man as a woman can be.” Race participants sometimes waited several days to show their support and Squeezie, the creator of the event, only did so on Tuesday.

He explained the delay, saying during a Twitch live that he didn’t want to talk about it “when he’s very angry, when he’s very heated” and not being “sure that it helps the cause to act like that under the impulse and under the anger.”

During his live, he spent about fifteen minutes explaining to his subscribers how this cyberbullying was sexist. He pointed out the form of the messages, their virulence and their number. To support his point, Lucas Hauchard took the example of the last two controversies in which he was involved: a platform on the regulation of the world of influence And the end of her relationship with the YouTuber CyprienAccording to him, in these two cases, his name was mentioned in 40,000 tweets, while Manon Lanza “received more than 65,000 tweets” with less notoriety.

“Zero tolerance”

And while in his chat, some people were saying that these facts had nothing to do with the fact that Manon is a woman, the videographer ended up getting angry: “Get out of this live! Get out of Twitch, get out of the networks! We all hate you, you shame us! You put us in a mess! Get out of here please!”

For Laure Salmona, from the collective Feminists Against Cyberbullying, this statement was “the legal minimum” and the influencer could go further. “He tells them ‘get lost’, but he has the possibility of banning them from his channel [NDLR: ce qu’il a fait mardi pour certains de ceux qui insultaient Manon dans le chat]”There could be zero tolerance for cyberbullying,” which would prevent people who commit cyberviolence from feeling impunity, she points out.

In 2021, streamer Ultia initially asked ZEvent organizers not to talk about the harassment she was experiencing, “so that the matter would die down.” Today, she feels she was “naive” because this strategy didn’t work.

“In hindsight, the organizers should have taken a direct position. And before participating in a big event like that, they should have signed a charter stating that all participants must speak out” in this type of situation.

A judicial component?

In order to end the feeling of impunity of the perpetrators of cyberbullying, Nat’ali would also like to see these cases take a judicial turn. “It is not within everyone’s reach to pay a lawyer and launch a complaint, but it is within Squeezie’s reach. He should be available to the collateral victims of his event, pay for their lawyer, support them,” suggests the streamer committed against cyberbullying. The penalty incurred for major perpetrators of online harassment is two years in prison and a fine of 30,000 euros.

Manon Lanza, for her part, indicated that she did not wish to file a complaint. We asked Bump if such support had been offered to her, but did not receive an immediate response.

Inequalities reproduced online

As Laure Salmona points out, cyberviolence is linked to the inequalities that exist in society, such as gender inequalities, and social networks are “magnifying mirrors” of these. Between them, content creators can be led to reproduce unequal dynamics. An Internet user pointed out on X (ex-Twitter) that of the last 10 videos published on Squeezie’s YouTube channel, very few women were mentioned or shown.

Others have pointed out the lack of parity among the guests of Maxime Biaggi, who hosts the popular show Zen on Twitch: over two seasons, only two women have been invited in about twenty episodes. In a 2019 report, the Council of Europe, an intergovernmental human rights organization, explains that an “unbalanced representation” and a “lack of meaningful participation of women” in the media “contributes to an environment that tolerates and normalizes ‘ordinary’ sexism.”

“It’s a responsibility, when you’re invited onto a channel and you’re a man, to see if a woman couldn’t be invited in your place,” says Laure Salmona.

Influencers too “smooth”?

Furthermore, the audience and economic model of influence do not necessarily encourage creators to take a stand in cases of sexist cyberbullying.

“Influencers, their goal is first of all to become famous and therefore to make money. And to do that, you must never be divisive, never take a position, never contradict. You have to be smooth,” Nat’Ali summarizes.

Since her cyberbullying began in 2021, Ultia says she feels ostracized and believes she has lost opportunities to collaborate with other influencers. “Big streamers aren’t going to contact you because you’re a problem person, we know that if you’re invited, there will be things to deal with, insults in the chat,” she says. When she participated in another streamer’s show in November 2022, she refused to send the link to her father in the face of the violence in the chat.

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